Hello Mechanic,
I'm breaking one of my cardinal rules here and posting with a headache so intense that I can barely see straight, much less think cogently... So my apologies for the quality of the following...
I'm not you are aware of this, but in your stream of consciousness above you have essentially recapitulated some of the primary arguments of what has come to be known as "evolutionary psychology" which claims to be the study of why our genes have evolved to make us behave the way we do. Why, for instance, do "sane" people kill their children, fight wars, and so on?
This discussion used to be handled by theologians and ethicists, but in recent years a number of factors in the academy; the enforced assumption of the non-existance of God, the resulting inability to posit absolutes, and the desire of the physical sciences to provide a unified theory to explain everything (guys like Richard Dawkins are leading that particular charge) have led to the rise of this pseudo-scientific school of philosophy which assumes we are all essentially machines designed by "natural selection" and seeks to explain why our CPUs function they way they do. Although proponents of evolutionary psychology, like Stephen Pinker use traditional terms like "evil" they have taken out a subjective existential meaning. The problem of evil has essentially been removed from debate, because evil doesn't exist and to a great extent, no one is really culpable for their actions - their genes made them do it.
While they claim to be scientific, what they have really done is create a replacement religion, and yes Darwinism is a religious system as many of it's practioners and defenders are willing to admit. As Prof. Michael Ruse, author of a number of works of Darwinian apologetics, including
Darwinism Defended, put it:
"Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion--a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. I am an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian, but I must admit in this one complaint . . . the literalists are absolutely right. Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.”By his reference to "from the beginning" he is probably making reference to Darwin's popularizer T.H. Huxley, who openly campaigned for evolution becoming the starting place for a new model of philosophy and ethics and religion founded on Darwinism. The committment to Darwinism as a foundation for philosophy can be found in the works of Popper, Skinner, and most of the evolutionists who have tackled philosophy in the 20th and 21st centuries. All of them have embraced the idea articulated by Ruse that
"Nevertheless, I have now come to see that our biological origins do make a difference, and that they can and should be a starting-point for philosophy today" But what kind of philosophy does this committment to "Darwinian natural selection" produce? Well certainly one that is ultimately amoral, arbitrary, and at places violently self-contradictory, and not one in which terms like "rights" or ultimately "right and wrong" have real meaning. I first tackled this hopeless hodgpodge philosopy in writing a review on evolutionary psychologist Stephen Pinker's
"How the Mind Works" which had created quite a stir coming as it did immediately after Pinker had published an article in the NYT magazine asserting essentially that genes were the root cause of parents killing their newborns.
Here are some of the relevant sections dealing with why philosophy and ethics founded on Darwinianism is a hopeless endeavor and one in which the proponents openly acknowledge we must assume that which they find to be verifiably false, without even being able to explain why we
must act in an ethical fashion in the first place. In other words, ethics in evolutionary psychology is a necessarily an empty game of make-believe:
Pinker obviously understands some of the problems his system creates, he notes that the concept that our genes predispose us to certain actions undercuts any possible basis for "free will and hence moral responsibility"32 In other words, if science certifies that our actions are caused by our "selfish genes" how will we will escape the trap of what Pinker calls "Creeping Exculpation?" This Pinker hopes to do by setting up Science and Morality as "separate spheres of reasoning." But while Science is grounded in Pinker's world on observation, conjecture, and experimentation and is therefore a recapitulation of the "brute facts" of life, ethics is to be grounded on a "idealization of human beings that makes the ethics game playable."33 This "game" of idealizations includes positing things as truth that Pinker's own theories dismiss as nonsense, namely that people are "free, sentient, rational, equivalent agents whose behavior is uncaused." The "game" allows us to come to conclusions that "can be sound even though the world, as seen by science, does not really have uncaused events." Without realizing it, Pinker has reinvented the "double theory of truth" that bedeviled the philosophy and theology of the middle ages. He creates a system of ethics founded on presumptions that his own scientific system says are verifiably false, and then expects people to follow it.
Sadly what Pinker never seems to grasp is that both his ethical and scientific systems are trading entirely on borrowed capital. He frequently uses all manner of phrases in place of the God he seeks to deny, such as "nature", "natural selection" or "Darwinism", all of which he uses as grand forces for producing design. His language is often the language that theists use, but at the critical moment when a theist would invoke the Deity he inserts some neutral force that allows him to maintain his autonomy rather than conceding that the design inherent in the world is a reflection of the fact of the Creator revealed in scripture. It often seems obvious that Pinker sees the prospect of God, made plain by natural revelation, and the gyrations that Pinker goes through to erase him are often baffling. A good example of this occurs in his section on the apparent design inherent in human beings:
"The eye has so many parts, arranged so precisely that it appears to have been designed in advance with the goal of putting together something that sees. The same is true for our other organs. Our joints are lubricated to pivot smoothily, our teeth meet to sheer and grind, our hearts pump blood every organ seems to have been designed with a function in mind. One of the reasons God was invented was to be the mind that formed and executed life's plans. The laws of the world work forward not backwards… What else but the plans of God could effect the teleology (goal-directedness) of life on earth?
Darwin showed what else."34
Pinker's book is brimming with passages like the one above, and each one is a testament to the fact that Pinker presupposes the falsity of Christian theism. He speaks of "laws of the world" and at the same time he denies the only possible giver and foundation for these laws. He admits that there is a "goal directedness" to life on earth and then immediately searches for an alternate solution to the obvious answer that presents itself. The fact of complex design screams at him from every facet of creation, and Pinker sees it as a verification of natural selection, and a proof that God cannot possibly exist. As Andrew Ferguson put it "It is one of the many curiosities of Darwinism that the more the world shows signs of design, the more it disproves a Designer of the world."35
32 Pinker, How the Mind Works, 54
33 Ibid., 55
34 Ibid., 156
35 Ferguson, How Steven Pinker’s Mind Works
So you may choose to go down the "our genes make us fight for the watering hole" road as an explanation for our behavior and eliminate any non-mechanical answers to why we do what we do, but be warned, followed to its ultimate end the kind of non-ethics Nietzche proposed becomes more and more coherent. If I'm programmed to kill you and take your resources and you have no absolute rights, and there is no absolute right or wrong, then things like the Holocaust and other Genocides are ultimately simply outgrowths of a highly systematic application of our "programming." Besides as you pointed out, "they cull the weak" and who are we to stand in the way of the desires of the pitiless god of Natural selection?
- SEAGOON
